Shakespeare in Class

Dickson, Lisa, Shannon Murray and Jessica Riddell. Shakespeare’s Guide to Hope, Life, and Learning. University of Toronto Press, 2023, 198 pp, $29.95C.

This book is a sort of transcript of a series of reading-club meetings. The club has three members, and they are discussing four Shakespeare plays, King Lear, As You Like It, Henry V, and Hamlet, in that order. Their discussion is structured: each member presents a “monologic” analysis of each play, with the other members chiming in with “dialogic” commentary. The monologic analysis is in black ink, and the dialogic gloss in red, blue or green, depending on which member is speaking. The discussion is also structured in that the reading-club members are all agreed (as the book’s title indicates) on what Shakespeare, generally, “means.”

There’s a prologue, called “Shakespeare, the Classroom, and Critical Hope.” It provides a biography of each of the members, detailing how they came to be reading Shakespeare in this way. For all of them, encountering his plays — as stage presentations mostly — was a revelation, a turning point in their lives. The prologue says, too, that all three authors found in Shakespeare what the book’s title says — hope, which the prologue specifies as “critical” hope, to which the prologue adds “critical love” and “critical empathy.” Critical hope, love or empathy seems to mean “thoughtful” hope, love or empathy — hope, love or empathy extracted from tangible, complex, and varied human experience: “Shakespeare engages in the habit of making what is in the sources simple into something complex: the multiplicity of voices and perspectives he presents insists on a complex judgment.” Nonetheless, for our authors Shakespeare’s message of hope, love and empathy is clear and simple: “Structurally and conceptually, Shakespeare’s works are sites where critical hope and empathy emerge into the collective cultural consciousness.”

Because Shakespeare meant this much to them, our three authors became English professors. As such, they teach Shakespeare’s plays, and have been doing so for an average of about ten years. In their conversation, they make much of their classroom experience. Their audience of students is a rather abstract one; students make no direct contribution to the discussion, but occasionally are reported to have said interesting things. There’s no direct allusion to how old the students would be, but Shakespeare turns up at the university in the standard sophomore “survey” course, in senior courses for elective credit or as an elective course in honours-English programs, and in graduate courses. Teaching grad students is not usually referred to as “classroom” teaching, though, so the students are anywhere from 19 – 25 years of age.

Despite the fact that the book is so much about classroom teaching, the authors claim not to mean it to be “a ‘how-to-teach Shakespeare’ book.” They add to this, as if to make it crystal clear, “nor is it a manual on best practices for teaching Shakespeare.” This could mean only that our professors want their book to be read by a general audience. They might guess that only colleagues (teachers of Shakespeare at all levels) would be interested in the classroom aspect of the book, but they would assume that Shakespeare fans generally, including teachers, would want to audit the course as it were, to hear what a trio of experts have to say — to hear, more specifically, how these experts have concluded that Shakespeare is a sort of guru, an oracle, a guide.

I think they would have done better by leaving out the classroom entirely and doing a straight trialogue on Shakespeare. Non-teaching fans will be distracted by the classroom aspect, maybe even slightly dismayed. Basically, it’s shop talk. It’s full of condescension towards students and valorization of the teacher’s difficult job. Students are described as, generally, “callous” — as immature, as requiring nudges of professorial authority to keep them receptive, and as needing to be guided away from a tendency to want “right answers” into an acceptance of “a new world of shades and layers and margins.” Most readers would doubt that such a world would be “new” to students; if there’s anything children learn, and learn from birth, it’s how to deal with what the professors likely mean by shades and layers.

Teaching is described as a bit of a bother — a distraction from research, the professor’s first love. Teaching is also said to be difficult emotionally: “Teaching is an exercise in hope: you must live in a world where you cannot see the impact you might have in some distant future you might never access — and do it anyway . . . to show the courage to examine the soul in order to share it with others . . . to embrace the transformational potential of putting one’s being on the line.” And there’s the anxiety: what if the students are oblivious to this messianic sacrifice?

Non-teaching fans of Shakespeare will also notice that the classroom aspect is only partly described. Absent is any consideration of what the students are actually doing in class — which is, as everyone knows from experience, rendering lectures into notes for use on tests. Students need good grades to move on to their professional certification. Our professors observe the mood changes in the students without mentioning the deadlines for essays and tests that cause the changes: “We are greeted in September with smiling, fresh faces, witness our students blossoming (or struggling to thrive) in October, watch those shiny faces pale under the weight of November, and (hopefully) sigh with relief when they regain a healthy robustness once term ends and the festive season arrives.” It seems that the ones who fail the essays and tests, and therefore face a blighted Christmas, disappear from consideration.

Finally, there’s too much professional bafflegab for non-teachers — Shakespeare in his plays is “engaging in the habit of making something simple . . . complex,” his plays are “sites where critical hope and empathy emerge into the collective cultural consciousness.” The abstract language is used to bury the fact that no really convincing argument can be made for Shakespeare as a guru of hope any more than one can be made for Shakespeare as a purveyor of nihilism. In the movie “The Postman,” Kevin Costner and Will Patton exchange quotes from Shakespeare, Costner trying to affirm Shakespeare’s celebration of peace, Patton his celebration of war. Costner wins, but only because he knows Shakespeare better, having made a living by recitations of great speeches from the plays. There’s a lot of evidence for either argument.

Conceivably, others occupying these “sites” (reading or seeing these plays) could go away with opposite messages. According to Joseph Goebbels (who had a doctorate in dramatic literature), Hitler possessed the complete works of Shakespeare in a reputable German translation, and read enough of them to conclude him superior to Germany’s great playwrights Goethe and Schiller. In one of his early sketchbooks, Hitler designed staging for the first act of Julius Caesar — Shakespeare influenced the architecture of the Reichstag. Hitler was a fan of Hamlet, fond of quoting “to be or not to be” and other lines. Conceivably at the end, as he quaffed the cyanide, his hopes of victory dashed, he found Hamlet’s soliloquy a comfort.  And, of course, Hitler’s propaganda machine made much of The Merchant of Venice. Presumably, if Hitler had had one of our professors to instruct him on Shakespeare, courageously examining her soul and putting her being on the line, he would have found the message of critical love in the plays and conducted himself accordingly.

As for teachers and professors auditing this course, they will enjoy it — as a handbook. I taught for two years at the university, and almost 30 at the college, level. At both levels, I occasionally taught Shakespeare, though most of my career was spent teaching business, technical, and non-literary freshman composition. I went through the same training as our three professors. The book is rich a source of topics for lectures, discussions, and essay and exam questions. It contains perceptive quotations from canonical critics — Jonson, Hazlitt, Coleridge etc. Finally, it shows how the professors managed the methodology of English teaching, a methodology that dates back to the beginnings of the department and that involves bringing out the “good” (in both the morally therapeutic and the aesthetically perfect sense) in canonical literature.

It’s a methodology derived from religion, as Edward Said, an English professor and prominent critic of literature, put it: “Literary criticism is essentially . . . religious. The model is commentary on sacred texts.” As V. S. Naipaul said, “Doing English was an extension of the divinity courses of the last [19^th] century.” The method was crystallized and certified by St. Augustine in De Doctrina. You take the essence (according to the church) of Christ’s message — the “do unto others” and “love thy neighbour” stuff — and apply it to the entire Bible. Where the Bible (or, in our case, Shakespeare) seems to be saying the opposite of the Golden Rule (as in the Abraham-Isaac story or Jacques’ Seven Ages of Man speech in As You Like It), you contextualize that part or interpret it metaphorically. Overall, as our professors put it, the message of Shakespeare is, “to love our fellow humans, no matter how strange and different from us.” The professors’ analysis of the plays, character by character and scene by scene, always leads to some version of this.

I found it instructive, sometimes inspiring from a technical point of view, to see how our professors worked the method. Generally, it’s bean-counting, as T. S. Eliot put it about the work of what he called the “teacher-critics.” You looked for proofs that, for example, Wordsworth wanted sex with his sister, that Coleridge poured the entire contents of the British Museum into “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” or that Milton — in justifying the works of God to man — continually sublimates the Calvinistic trauma of presuming to speak for God. The departmental methodology could lead to “interesting” results, Eliot admitted, but it was based on two false concepts: that “there must be just one interpretation,” and that this interpretation “is necessarily an account of what the author consciously or unconsciously was trying to do.” There’s also the assumption that the teacher critic’s interpretation reveals more of the overall greatness of the work — professors don’t usually trouble themselves with non-canonical works.

That Shakespeare is full of good advice is an unsophisticated theme for a book meant for adult reading. You can tell in this book when our professors identify relevant beans of good advice — there’s a lot of boisterous “thumbs-upping” in the gloss. Teachers and fans of Shakespeare would be alerted in these places to some “interesting” exegesis, but would I think find the mutual congratulations incessant and overdone.

The more inspired analysis and gloss comes when the professors sense Hitler in the classroom, working on his Fine Arts degree, maybe, going for three elective credits in a subject that’s always interested him, dismayed by the number of mongrel-race individuals present, most of whom seem to be smarter and better-looking than him. Our professors are candid about their enterprise at these times: “The dark side of hope is a shadow that looms over this book. The authors of this book imagine a host of hope warriors determined to make the world more inclusive and equitable for all. Assuming that all those who wield hope do so through the lens of human rights and sovereignty for all people and planet is presumptuous at best, downright dangerous at worst.”

Indeed. Our professors are candid about, but don’t deal with, this shadow over their analysis. What if that host of happy-face hope warriors is not out there? What if the good advice that our professors find in Shakespeare and dish out copiously is pollyannish? The shadow falls again when our professors analyze Hamlet’s “to be or not to be,” a list of the evils perpetrated by people on people and an argument for suicide. Or when they get to the “Seven Ages of Man” speech, a totally nihilistic account of human life.  These parts of the book are good reading. About Jacques’ speech, Murray says: “The speech worries me as an example of an often-quoted bit of Shakespeare gone wrong, taken from its dramatic context and allowed to stand on its own as a statement of the play itself or even of the author.” All three professors confess that their contextualizing, the idea that Shakespeare was a great poet but an even greater playwright (Jacques is sandwiched between the hopeful Duke and the empathetic lover and his self-sacrificing servant) doesn’t quite convince them.

It’s not dangerous to assume that Shakespeare himself was a “hope warrior,” but trying to prove it trivializes the experience of reading or watching the plays. Experiencing the plays should be an escape from life — into a world of wish-fulfilment and nightmare where exaggerated characters speak an inspired English that no one has ever spoken but that echoes down the ages. The professors do argue that they don’t want students to get into fingering out relatable characters and incidents, because it shuts down the discussion too soon. But, again, shutting down the discussion is what professors do in setting essay topics and test questions.

The trouble is that our professors have misapplied their methodology. It is not for preaching to adults, but for teaching children their letters. Usually, Shakespeare pops up on the curriculum of junior and senior high school, for students in their early teens. They are idealistic, and taken by colorful characters and settings and simply-plotted stories with lots of suspense and violence. They are immensely more experimental and sophisticated with language than their parents, averse to speaking in the standard and alert to the latest metaphors and conceits. Shakespeare can be a big draw for them. In the movie “Dead Poets Society,” Robin Williams, in teaching his teenage boys all about the carpe diem theme, which is prominent in Shakespeare as in most 15^th and 16^th century poets, applies the theme to life in general but especially to attracting girls: “Language was invented for one reason, boys. To woo women.” For Williams in the movie, Shakespeare and his colleagues show how getting a girl can best be done.

The methodology used by Williams and our professors in their analysis of Shakespeare was developed over four centuries by Christian humanists — at first, priests like Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus — who in the 16^th century were concerned with spreading literacy in both Latin and the European vernaculars. Teaching reading and writing has always been the English department’s main job, and students were set to reading and writing about secular texts, mostly classical literature in the original and in translation and, as time went on, literary texts in the vernaculars. Using literature was safer than using the Bible, over the interpretation and text of which people were being immolated and wars were being fought.

All composition handbooks, right back to classical times, convey the same advice about writing. To start, you isolate a single theme, a specific “take” on a specific topic. The humanists were theologians, so the single theme had to be the Golden Rule. Extracting this theme from poems and stories engaged impressionistic and idealistic kids. It taught them a message that was at the heart of Christianity and (then) liberalism, and so was acceded to by most parental and civic authority. It gave them that single theme around which to organize their compositions. It got them started on standardizing their English.

But it had a side effect in the schools: it turned writers like Shakespeare from entertainers into purveyors of wisdom, and teachers like our professors into priests. By the mid 19^th century, Matthew Arnold, poet and school inspector (curriculum enforcer and teacher evaluator), was moved to announce, “without poetry, our science will appear incomplete, and what now passes with us for religion will be replaced by poetry.” English teachers came to see themselves as preaching from a secular canon from the pulpit of a secular church, the English department.

Because poets and fiction writers produce the canon, the department became a friendly place for them; at present, about 60% of published poets in North America and Britain live in the vicarages of the university department, as well as about 35% of fiction writers. The department could easily hold them, as the universities started (with Harvard in 1867) gobbling up disciplines beyond theology, law and mathematics. The demand for literacy training for engineers, accountants, doctors and other professionals increased exponentially. Professors gained a huge audience. So did writers — an audience that became important as the book lost its status as the only manufactured platform for art and started giving way to films and recordings. Literature has a sort of afterlife in the schools, but there’s a drawback for poet-professors. As one of them, Randall Jarrell, put it with sardonic accuracy, “The gods who took away the poet’s audience gave him students.”

Outside the department, the humanistic-Arnoldian methodology was viewed with suspicion. Other faculties wanted spelling, grammar, rhetoric and format taught directly, using grammar books, and samples of the kind of writing that their students would be doing in their professions: feasibility reports, progress reports, meeting agendas etc. Entrance tests and remedial courses were introduced (1867), business and technical writing courses (1920s), and a one-term non-literary composition course (1950s – 1960’s). The department adapted — if it hadn’t, it would have lost control of almost all of its students and the revenue they represented. Sub-departments were spun off, composition handbooks written, journals devoted to rhetoric and linguistics launched, and whole new generations of teachers of “professional writing” trained. The idea that the department was preaching values, molding minds, spreading culture, was put aside by all but the old English-Studies and new Women’s-Studies parts of the department. There, in Women’s Studies (and later with Queer Studies and Identity Studies), the department was able to return to its literary vomit, and the preaching continued.

Then (in the 1970s), young English professors of the New Left decided that they had lost the war against the “system” and came up with the idea that the system was not repairable and had to be destroyed entirely. They started with what they had some control over, the canon of great works, applying a technique called “deconstruction.” Feminist and LGBTQ professors deconstructed the canon as male and sexist; minority-ethnicity professors deconstructed it as “white,” “racist.” and “colonialist.” Ultimately, any distinction between literature and any other kind of writing disappeared. As Robert Lecker, of the English department at McGill, put it in 2006, “Why should a poem have more status than a restaurant review? Why is a novel a higher form of writing than a well-written travel guide? They are just different kinds of texts and their value lies in what we make of them.”

This made professors dominant over texts, but it also enabled students to lobby for the elimination of literature from the curriculum: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, ho, western civ has got to go.” You could see their point. No more suffering through hours of boring and irrelevant (to their future careers) exegesis of the Canterbury Tales by some idiot who claimed to have your best interests at heart and had to power to force you to go along. No more torturous hours — hours better spent on math or anatomy —­ trying to think of something to say about The Wasteland.

And in the course of all this, the students realized that the professors themselves, obviously a privileged bunch and therefore implicated in furthering the hegemonic designs of western civ, were in need of deconstruction. There followed the boycotting of professors’ classes, the driving of them into psychiatric care homes, and the ruining of their careers. Revenge! Their opinions (Jordan Peterson at the University of Toronto, Brett Weinstein at Evergreen College, etc), their non-participation in marches, and even their t-shirts (Lucia Martinez Valdivia at Reed College), sparked witch hunts. Their course outlines and notes were scrutinized and censored. Did they teach Austen without considering her family connections to slavery and the amount of sugar she took in her tea? Or Shakespeare without acknowledging his appropriation of culture in writing about Shylock and Othello? If they did, pull the fire alarm, vacate the classroom, and ease your trauma by stalking your professor or working with the play-dough in a safe room.

To cut to the chase, what amazed me about this book is that our professors seem to have missed it all. I applaud them for this. I had assumed that, after some 40 years of identarian (feminist, LGBTIA2S+ian, ethnic minoritarian, indigenous, fat-acceptance, and other-advantagist) deconstruction of the white, male, canon, on the absolute top of which Shakespeare has forever squatted, such obvious bardolatry was verboten. Miraculously, our girls (surely some affectionate, if politically-incorrect, bantering is permissible now among the happy survivors of dark days), through their years of study and teaching, emerged free of wokeism, not only secure and comfortable in their jobs, but also holding faith in the humanistic methodology that was supposed to have been taken down and replaced with deconstructive Theory.

I have no idea how they did it. Strength of character, perhaps, an innate conservatism, a talent for walking through minefields, or the survival in dark corners of the department of nests of Arnoldians. And, of course, it helped that the basic structures and protocols of the university were never thoroughly deconstructed — possibly because faculties and students in the Sciences and Applied Sciences, happy with their disciplines as useful and progressive, and mindful of their pensions/certifications, ignored deconstruction.

At this point, though, thankful as I am for our girls’ mental and moral survival, and appreciative as I am for their book as an indication of the state of the profession, I have the urge to put my arm around their collective shoulder, and my lips close (perhaps too close) to their collective ear, and issue a warning. The tide of deconstructive nihilism may be receding, but it is not yet out. The university may be becoming safer for humanists, but society, now staffed by thousands of woke teachers, social workers and politicians, may not be safe.

First, our professors could be accused of being pronoun-insensitive. They use the plural “they, their, them” with a singular antecedent the sexuality of which is indeterminant. This is a reasonable compromise, though it grates on me for whom “they” is forever plural. And they don’t clutter their prose with “zie, zir, zirs” and other neutral-pronoun innovations. However, Shakespeare is a “he,” as is Philip Sidney and a host of other perpetrators of the white, male canon. Deconstructive analysis holds that referring to Shakespeare as “he” may be to besmirch his memory and detach him from his natural community — a community that may be eager to claim him for whatever reason, and that may feel that it alone has the right to explain or even just read him.

After all, as commentators on the Sonnets point out, Shakespeare may have actually been gay, in love with the Earl of Southampton. Others hold that Shakespeare was actually a girl, the dark lady of the Sonnets herself, specifically Maria Bassano Lanier. All this seems credible when one examines the frontispiece of First Folio, which shows a person who seems an unlikely candidate to be author of the greatest body of dramatic literature known to humanity. That person, as the great Canadian structuralist critic and theorist Northrop Frye pointed out, is “obviously an idiot.” Endless attempts have been made to render more interesting that bland face, that vacuous expression. Shades seem to work best.

Even more dangerously, our professors actually say, albeit in bafflegab, that Shakespeare is one of the good things about British colonialism: “Shakespeare’s works have achieved wide currency because they were borne outward in the world on a wave of imperialist energy that, in seeking to turn all the world into England, opened the English consciousness and Shakespeare’s plays to powerful reimaginings and rescriptings.” In my community, which is also Dickson’s, people have had to resign from jobs and elected positions for talking about the “good side” of colonialism.

Finally, if our girls do represent a full-cycle return to the Arnoldian faith, that may not ultimately be good thing for either them or the department. It was the excesses of Arnoldianism that led to deconstruction, and our girls actually seem to believe with Arnold that role of the teacher is God-like, the classroom a sort of Garden of Eden wherein humans pass from innocence to experience: “For learners to have the confidence to occupy the perspective of the Other, and inhabit two worlds simultaneously without losing their sense of self, they need to go through a process of self-determination: discomfort, alienation, humility, reflection . . . . The course functions in some ways like the apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil . . . . You are kicked out of the metaphorical garden of complacency to navigate a world of perilous landscapes and challenging conditions where ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are not easily demarcated.”

Our girls actually believe that, thanks to Shakespeare, they can tell right from wrong. They have no problem promoting, in Shakespeare’s name, changes in attitudes and opinions. This, surely, is overreach.